Europe|Cyprus Reunification Talks, ‘Close, but Not Close Enough,’ Fail

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Cyprus Reunification Talks, ‘Close, but Not Close Enough,’ Fail

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A man walks near the U.N.-controlled buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus. The latest round of talks, part of a 43-year effort, collapsed on Friday.CreditCreditYiannis Kourtoglou/Reuters

By The Associated Press

July 7, 2017

NICOSIA, Cyprus — The latest round of talks in a decades-long effort to reunify the ethnically split island nation of Cyprus collapsed on Friday.

While many issues remained unresolved, the deal breaker was a clash over what would happen to the more than 35,000 troops that Turkey has kept in the island’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot north since 1974, when it invaded after a coup mounted by supporters of union with Greece.

“Now our voices need to be louder, more convincing,” said an activist, Tina Adamidou, who has participated in nightly peace demonstrations at the United Nations-controlled buffer zone that cuts across the country’s capital. “We need to show that as Cypriots we are united.”

Greek and Greek Cypriot officials said it was Turkey’s “obsession” with keeping its troops in place and the right to militarily intervene post-reunification that derailed the talks. Turkish and Turkish Cypriot officials said pulling all troops out and abolishing intervention rights were out of the question.

“We came very close,” Mustafa Akinci, the president of Northern Cyprus, said.

“Close, but not close enough,” the United Nations envoy Espen Barth Eide, who had practiced months of shuttle diplomacy in hopes the talks would yield a peace deal, wrote in a post on Twitter.

Officials involved in the 10 days of difficult negotiations at a Swiss resort said the failed talks would not be the end of the road for peace on Cyprus. But there are now questions about the goal of future negotiations.

Turkey has indicated it would consider settling the decades-old problem in ways other than reunifying Cyprus as a federation, which has been the objective of peace talks for 43 years.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu of Turkey wrote on his personal Twitter account that the result showed the “impossibility” of a federal Cyprus.

“We will continue efforts for a settlement within different parameters,” Mr. Cavusoglu said.

It was unclear what those parameters would be. Suggestions of a formal partition of the island or Turkey’s outright annexation of the north have swirled for years. Mr. Akinci said Turkish Cypriots would now focus on strengthening the north’s ties with other parts of the world. Only Turkey recognizes the breakaway north.

“Turkey will use to the end all of its rights stemming from international laws to protect the rights of the northern Cyprus Turkish state and of our brothers living there,” Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said.

In declaring the talks’ collapse early Friday, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, left the door open for “other initiatives” to resolve the decades of ethnic separation on Cyprus.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Talks on Cyprus Reunification Fall Apart. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe